The old animism
E. B. Tylor's 1871 formulation described animism as belief in souls, and treated it as the earliest and least developed form of religion — an intellectual error that science would correct. That evolutionary frame shaped a century of writing about Indigenous traditions.
The new animism
From the 1990s, ethnographers including Hallowell's earlier Ojibwe work, Bird-David, Ingold, Descola and Viveiros de Castro reframed animism as a relational ontology: a way of engaging a world populated by many kinds of persons, where personhood is a relationship rather than a property.
- Persons are recognised through relationship and communication, not species
- Ethics extend to rivers, animals, mountains and made objects
- Knowledge is produced by attentive engagement, not detached observation
Why it matters to shamanic practice
If the world is full of persons with interests, then illness, scarcity and conflict become diplomatic problems. The ritual specialist becomes a negotiator, translator and occasionally an adversary in a crowded social field.